Machine translation (MT) is the automatic translation, for example, using a computer system, from a first language (a “source” language) into another language (a “target” language). Systems that perform an MT process are said to “decode” the source language into the target language. From an end-user's perspective, the MT process is relatively straight-forward. The MT process receives as input a source sentence (or “string” of words) and after processing the input sentence, outputs a translated sentence in the target language.
One type of MT process is referred to as a statistical MT decoder. Conventional statistical MT decoders may include a language model (LM) and a translation model (TM).